all I can say is about this book is..."it's about time". Shadowrun has been going down hill, especially with the launch failure of their collaborative effort with cliffhanger's over shadowrun chronicles as well as the whole, shall we say the less than popular CDF concept. It nice to see that their is some quality left in this game and this book is one of them. An old school "dic" with a modern twist..nice. Overall, its a novel that won't disappoint.

I'll explain - any experienced Shadowrun fan will tell you that, by and large, most Shadowrun fiction of old isn't that great. There are some truly fantastic books, but most are actually quite middling at best, with a focus on quantity. This was common in many tabletop RPG houses back in the late 80s and 90s - more books, rather than less books with a higher quality.

This is not one of those books.

To start with, Catalyst have collected and published a truly very high quality set of novels for the new Shadowrun line - fantastic stuff, guys! Keep at it! Better late than never. I'm thoroughly enjoying the past year, even if it's not actually the right year.

Anyways, this is the veritable cherry on top - hardboiled detective fiction (in an urban near-future fantasy world), far more Marlowe than Dresden or even Nigel Findley's (RIP) Dirk Montgomery. And it works, with deep character development, a very well crafted Mary Sue motif that spins around itself to reveal humanity at its flawed core.

Hardboiled, action, a pretty awesome detective story, and great character design, never mind the writing quality (which is superb). This is quite possibly the best Shadowrun novel I've read in my life - a position I once firmly gave to Findley's 2XS.

If you're a Shadowrun fan, go buy and read this.
If you're a detective fiction fan, go buy and read this.
Cyberpunk fan? Like urban fantasy? Yeah, you should probably buy and read this, too.
Heck, want to experience something new? Yeah, probably not the best introduction to the setting, but get it anyway - we'll talk about ironing out the background info post-fact once you're hooked.

Want a smaller sample? Go and snag Neat by the same author - great novella, and it ties into the same locations, characters, and story as this novel. In fact, go get that one either way.

Mr. Zimmerman, I have no idea why CGL have been basically hiding you until relatively recently. I realize that writing novels isn't much of a stable day job, but you should really be doing a lot more of it.

Thanks for a wonderful experience, and keep up the good work. Looking forward to anything else of yours that may hit the market.

Buyer beware this is not new material or anything that really advances the storyline. I bought it impulsively without seeing the preview thinking it was going to be unseen units and was greatly dissapointed

In a nutshell it's a compulation of units from the other 3145 sources that didn't already make it into TRO3145. That includes the faction specific PDFs, Field Manuals, Era Reports, and some other sourcebooks.

It also means there is nothing new in here unit wise. However just like the print version of the other 3145 TROs the units in here do get new famous pilot, and variant write ups.

There's also a section on variants of older mech models that I have not seen before.

Overall had the product description and name not been quite as uninformative and or misleading this would actually be a good product.

Finally if you prefer dead tree books to the many PDFs then you'll likely want to pick this up as will compile the until now PDF only units into a print edition at last.

Shaken: No Job Too Small is my favorite of the recent batch of Shadowrun fiction. The story of Jimmy Kincaid resonates with both my love of Shadowrun and my love of noir fiction. The character is genre savvy enough that he views his life through a black and white filter on his cybereyes. Little details like that really draw me into a story. It's a very personal story too, and I love learning more about Kincaid. It doesn't skimp on the rest of the world though, and I love the climax too. My favorite thing about Zimmerman's style is that the way he writes, I can see it in game terms too. There were some spots where I was like "Kincaid totally just spent Edge."If you're gonna start with any of the recent Shadowrun novels, start with this one. You won't be disappointed. Mr. Zimmerman is a fine predecessor to the legends of Shadowrun fiction like Nigel Findley. 5/5 would read again.

Its content is honestly almost everything I'd want from a book like this. New cyberware, new bioware, new genetech, new nanotech, and the return of many classics. Some amazing new qualities and life modules. It has advance medicine rules and the return of "brain hacking." But strangely no rules for severe trauma, which was one of my favorite optional rules from SR4's Augmentation. There are also expanded rules for drugs. Not just new drugs but custom made drugs too.

It starts off with some great fluff about an elf that became a Street Samurai, and the danger of watching your close friend turn into a meat sack housing a psychotic AI. A lot of people complain about fluff in the core rule supplements, but screw them. Fluff is awesome and helps set the world. With that said, there might be a bit too much fluff. The first 50 pages are pretty much pure fluff, and that's just a lot to take in when I want to start seeing the meat and potatoes of the book.

There are however many downsides to the book. The threat section talks about a lot of awesome classical threats, like the advancements made in cyber zombies, but there are no rules for them! And it's true that the SR4 rules for them are still entirely applicable to SR5, but still seeing the rules updated for SR5 would be nice. The Table of Content is also total garbage and is pretty much unusable.

Over all, the content is what I want to see, and if you're playing anyone that might want some ware installed into their meat body, you should pick this up. It's well worth it.

I try to never mention an author by name when I review something, just in case a piece is negative or critical, lest the creator think it’s a personal or mean-spirited attack on them – especially if I end up pooh-poohing several of their pieces in a row. I do need to mention, though, that I really like Russell Zimmerman’s work. Enough that he’s won awards from us here at Diehard GameFAN for his work on pieces like Elven Blood and the Shadowrun Returns Anthology (along with all the other contributors in that collection). I’ve even contributed money to his crowdfunding efforts for his own FATE based game, Strays. Of course, I’m sure he’ll be the first to tell you that I’ve probably taken a steaming slagpile on some of his stuff as well, but it’s all part of being a critic. I simply bring this up because what you’re about to read is a very positive review, and it’s worth including a preamble that I enjoy Zimmerman’s writing and my support of his Kickstarter, just in case someone thinks there is a bit of bias in this piece. There’s not, but I’m upfront whenever I review someone I’ve donated money to because hey, journalistic integrity. Now, let’s review this novel.

Shaken is not only the latest Shadowrun novel to come out from Catalyst Game Labs, but it’s also the latest piece featuring burned out mage slash ex-Lone Star officer turned paranormal investigator Jimmy Kincaid. As you read through this book, there are numerous references to Zimmerman’s other works, including the aforementioned Elven Blood, but also a lot of other Shadowrun pieces, ranging from Storm Front to The Land of Promise. Most of all though, the book is a direct follow-up to the novella Neat. While you don’t need to read Neat, or any of the other referenced pieces in this novel, it does help to have read them to fully appreciate the book and the characters it contains. I will admit that the book probably loses something if you don’t get all these references, but it’s not like SOME Shadowrun manuals/sourcebooks that not only reference a dozen other expensive tabletop gaming releases, but actively assume you have read and memorized them. So again, you can still enjoy Shaken: No Job Too Small if you haven’t read any other Shadowrun releases. It will still be a good read too, but you aren’t getting the full experience. So you might want to go buy Neat first. It’s short, it’s good and it’s only $2.99. Although CGL would be smart to bundle in a digital copy of Neat with purchases of Shaken for only ninety-nine cents. They’d make a little extra money and move some more copies. Anyway, for those of you who are big Shadowrun fans, expect a lot of famous to somewhat familiar faces to pop up in this novel, in addition to a few less familiar faces.

The first three chapters of Shaken feel VERY different from the rest of the novel. In fact, they read like three stand-alone short stories rather than part of a novel. As such, part of me was expecting this to be a collection of short stories, until I hit Chapter Four and the real story began rolling. So expect a little turbulence at the beginning of the book as the flow changes, not quite abruptly, but enough that you’ll wonder what just happened. The first three chapters aren’t bad. It’s just a different flow and style of storytelling from the rest of the book. It’s more a setup for who Kincaid is, how he thinks, and the way he operates. While these three chapters do feel like they could be short stories in their own right, they do connect back to the larger picture. You’ll just have to be much farther along in the book for those events to circle back around and fold into the overall narrative.

So who is Jimmy Kincaid? In many ways, I view him as a John Constantine analogue for Shadowrun. They look and dress similar, although Kincaid has pointed ears due to being an elf. They both smoke. They’re both quite good as spell-slinging, although Kincaid’s best days are over at the time Shaken occurs. They’re both filled with self-loathing and self-pity, and do paranormal detective work. However, both have a heart of gold and are immensely loyal to their friends, even though they sometimes refuse to admit they actually have any. If you’ve ever read the issue of Hellblazer where Constantine’s friends throw him a birthday party (and he throws up on Phantom Stranger), it reminded me a LOT of a scene in Shaken where the generally morose Kincaid realizes he has a lot of people who like and respect him. Kincaid is NOT a carbon copy of Constantine, though. After all, Kincaid is an ex-cop, has had his magic mostly ripped out of his soul, is much better in a physical fight and is only half the jackass Constantine is. One is British and the other is Pac NW Elven (but not Tir). However, the two are similar enough than if you like Constantine’s movie, TV show or comics, you’ll probably really like Kincaid and he’ll be a great gateway into the Sixth World for you. It also means that I’d read and recommend Zimmerman doing a run on Hellblazer once James Tynion IV finishes his current run on the comic.

The plot of Shaken: No Job Too Small is a bit meandering. It’s not one straight shot from beginning to end like a lot of gaming novels. Instead, Shaken is more like a river. It has a definite beginning and an end point, and when you’re done, the curves, forks and fjords make a lot of sense, but as you read through it, you might be wonder why there is an abrupt change in the story. As mentioned earlier, this is most obvious with those first three chapters, but the book has several about faces where the core focus shifts from one thing to something very different. This is not a bad thing, far from it. This is more a warning that you’re in for a roller coaster of a ride, and as you’re reading, you’ll wonder if a plot point in a much earlier chapter is ever going to be touched on again and then… bam it’ll be back twenty or thirty chapters LATER. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Shaken reads far less like the usual linear two-dimensional licensed fiction that comes from gaming companies (oh god the wretchedness that is Arkham Horror fiction) and far more like a William Gibson novel for those of you who like your cyberpunk-noir blends (and you probably do if you are reading this review!). So the book is more nuanced, and more in-depth than the vast majority of your gaming fiction. So, again, if you like say, Neruomancer and Hellblazer, you’ll like Shaken. If you like something more straightforward and to the point, Shaken‘s going off its own rails, at times, might throw you for a loop.

Shaken has Kincaid not only battling his own personal demons but those of Puyallup, Washington. Now I don’t mean literal demons. Like aliens, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in Shadowrun, but demons take many forms. In the case of Kincaid, his demons are addictions. Cheap hooch, cigarettes and protein shakes. Most of all is his addiction to Ariana, Kincaid’s ally spirit sidekick. Ariana has most of Kincaid’s magical heft since it was ripped from him by a vampire several years ago. So he’s very reliant on her for more than anything except counterspells and some light hocus pocus. At a point in the novel, Ariana goes away (not by choice) and Kincaid is forced to do things on his own for perhaps the first time since college. Although I absolutely hate it when people read things that aren’t there into a book, it was hard not to see this as a metaphor for Kincaid breaking his most powerful addiction of all – reliance on others to do the heavy lifting for him. At the tail end of the novel another ally of Kincaid more or less says this to him in tough love fashion (Skip’s not one for pleasantries), and after Ariana leaves, Kincaid does learn to trust in his remaining magical abilities and even makes a deal with the devil to get more powerful – if he accomplishes a rather daunting goal put forward by a spirit mentor known as Adversary (again, not that Adversary, devils and demons aren’t literal in the Sixth World). In the end, the biggest loss Kincaid can suffer actually makes him stronger, and he learns to be reliant on himself, rather than a crutch – even a sweet, loveable scamp of a crutch. So there is a quasi G.I. Joe “Now I know” moral inserted into the tale – whether it was intentionally planned or just a side effect of the story as it came to life is a question I can’t answer.

The core plot of Shaken has Kincaid hired to solve the murder of his favorite college professor – a murder that the local police have ruled as suicide, even though he appears to be several pints short of blood. Along the way, Kincaid has to deal with Puyallup locals, the mob, the yakuza, the monster that destroyed him magically years ago, a veritable horde of ghouls, shadowrunners, an angry mage with a vendetta against him, his own hermetic order, and of course, the big bad behind the death of his client. That’s a lot to cover in under 300 pages, but Kincaid does it all with his usual panache and grumbling. As I said earlier, all of the above encounters are connected, but it might not seem so obvious while you are reading it for the first time. Shaken is one of those books where you connect a lot of the dots due to hindsight. It’s a very fast paced read with a lot of death and violence, so the action really never dies down.

The story isn’t all hack and slash though. Not by a long shot. Indeed the characterization of the supporting cast and crew is the highlight of the book. As much as I enjoyed Kincaid, there were actually a half dozen other characters I found I liked better and wanted to read more about. If anything convinced me that Martin De Vries, Street Legend and Van Helsing meets Vampire Hunter D of the 2070s could easily support his own novel, it was his appearances in Shaken. I also loved the character of Gentry, who I think could support his own novel or short story as well. He’s a wacky decker who is equal parts Johnny Mundo, human that grew up in an elvish community (The Tir to be exact) and 90s bike courier. I really liked him and hoped he would end up being Kincaid’s wacky sidekick. He didn’t, but I was happy to see he came back about twenty chapters after he first appeared and play an important role in the climax of Shaken. There was Pinkerton, a black dwarf who shares a similar back story to Kincaid but without the magic and a lot of the gloom and doom angst. I think he’d be a fun character to get the spotlight at some point. Even a very minor character such as the homeless teenage dwarf Gem had potential for more to be written about, as there were story threads about that character left dangling. Seriously, she only appears in one or two chapters, and yet she’s so well written, she had more personality and depth to her than some protagonists in other novels. Great writing leads to great characters. Let us just hope that some of the characters you meet in Shaken get to be the stars of their own Sixth World fiction down the road.

So there you go. I’ve tried to be spoiler free, because there are a lot of twists and turns in the novel (even if the killer of Kincaid’s client was apparent to me right away. I can’t say why, but it just kind of leapt out at me.) and I want you to be able to enjoy this book. It’s a fantastic look at Shadowrun, and even if you’re in the midst of an Editions Wars or you don’t like the mechanics of the game, you can still sit down with this novel and have a good time reading it. Like Borrowed Time, Shaken: No Job Too Small is a reminder of the glory days of Shadowrun novels that we had back in the 90s. With two terrific books that are amongst the best gaming fiction released this year, this is shaping up to be the best time to read about Shadowrun in two decades. Let us hope CGL and their writers can keep the streak alive. Go buy this.

As the Periphery and SLDF are the only factions of this time period who engage in any major conflict, one would think they'd both be detailed. Instead, the information is truncated to save space.

RWR info is on the Divisional level, not Regimental like every other faction of the period, despite being the primary antagonist of the whole era. O.o (Imagine if the Word of Blake got 4 pages, total, in their own Field Report, while Stone's Coalition received a 280-page book; how and why would you play this?!)

MAF section has an entire paragraph cut-and-pasted from the DCMS book. No proof-reading.

ONE paint scheme is given, when most of these regiments have zero published to-date.

RAT is missing an entire row and is a cut-and-paste hack job.

Coming up on a year, we've yet to see any errata and none is on the table to be published; the book is just being sold in an incomplete state.

TLDR: Don't buy this book unless you specifically want more Matrix fluff or run decker/technomancer-centric campaigns. Go get Run Faster if you haven't already.

I went into Data Trails knowing that others had already said the "good stuff" was missing from it. I kept a detailed report of how I felt about the book. It started off with five stars, and then after the first section of fluff it quickly dropped off. I eventually had to quit reading and come back a long time later to finish up. I am reading it a second time just for the rules, but now I can't even do that.

First and foremost, their talk back in January about fixing up the proofing process back at the end of January (link below) seems to have not gotten anywhere, as there was a parade of errors in the book. It's hard to stay into the reading when I keep coming across them.

Second, I was hoping Data Trails would fill the void of questions left about the Matrix. All it really did was add some things on and provide a lot of fluff. Most of the fluff is good fluff, mind you, but still. And then the end is padded with a re-explaination of the rules.

I'm giving this a 3 if only because there are added things in here that are -fun-, and some are -interesting-. But in all honestly, I'm highly disappointed in Catalyst and will be taking back my pledge to buy their books until there's been a good amount of time to see reviews.

I love the Matrix. And I really like SR5. I think they've done a lot to really improve the game from SR4.

The Matrix resolves faster and its rules are more consistent with the rest of the game.

With that said, Data Trails is terrible. Its the lightest core supplement book released so far. Not just on page count, but also on crunch. A lot of this book is fluff, and don't get me wrong, I love the fluff in SR. But the Matrix doesn't need fluff, it needs more options. There are only 2 really new things, Deep Dives, where you go into the Foundation of a Host and can control it but where the rules get weird and dangerous and a lot more abstract, and playable AIs. There is also one new Matrix action and the ability to modify electronics, which are cool but I don't feel drastically add to the rules.

There is some pretty damn good fluff in here too. The short story, Body Hunt, is an amazing read and even brings back the classic character Wolf from Michael A. Stackpole's Wolf and Raven novel. But, while the story was a great read, the rules to do what is done in the story are not explained. Though it is kind of implied how to possibly handle it. And another other short story, Corporate Sponsorship has a decker data spike a camera then mark it with sleaze, which makes no sense by the rules. Anyway, this isn't actually important, because I don't think fluff and crunch need to match, but it sure is nice when it does.

The problem is there isn't enough content in this book. It has a lot of sample hosts and NPCs, which I don't care about, because I'd rather buy an adventure book for that content. For a core supplement I'd rather have more options for deckers and TMs for players, which can also give more ideas and options for NPCs.

The worst part is that there are rules for NPCs but not for PCs. No prices for wireless-negating-paint or faraday cages. No rules for writing software. Nothing for how much it costs to have a host. This means that NPCs can have these things, while PCs can not. One of the things that helps GMs and players is the ability to theorycraft and steal ideas from each other. Anything the PCs can come up with, the GM can use and visa versa. But that is not the case in Data Trails as the GM and PCs are playing with slightly different tools. Its disappointing.

There is also a lot of word count dedicated on clarifying core. Which honestly, is lame. I didn't pay $25 to get the same content in core just explained to me again. I want new stuff. Exciting stuff. Cool stuff. I just want pointless part of the rules that really slow down gameplay, like hacking cameras or opening doors to resolve faster while having epic things like data steals be even more epic and amazing. I want the Matrix to be so insanely invasive to the setting that a hacker isn't there just to loop cameras and open doors, but is there to mess people up with hacking, like a mage can with a fireball or a street sam with a big gun. I just want the Matrix to matter. This book doesn't help with that.

where to start..to much fluff, no chapter directory, to much fluff, some use able material SOME not much, to much fluff, its poor handling of mental health issues, to much fluff. All in all this product no ready for prime time and should be avoided like the CDF....writers please emp that idea or do a dream sequence like it never existed..like a bad acid trip and get back the game at hand. Mental health is a real and serious issue..trying to be retards and making light of it in this way is such bad karma. Avoid this product!!!